Many of my readers may have noticed the lack of activity on this blog over the past five months; maybe even the past year. You might even be wondering why I’ve been so quiet. I’ve been neglecting you all; for that I apologize. You are owed an explanation and I have been wanting to give one to you. I just have had a hard time finding the words… so here is my best attempt.

When I started this blog, I was going through a pretty life-altering transitional phase. Believe it or not, that was six years ago; my first post was a Calvin and Hobbes strip on October 10, 2008. I was shedding my younger self the way your body sheds old cells (and trust me, it was just as ugly); I wanted to grow, to expand my potential, to make a better future for myself.

You see I didn’t like the person I had become and I needed an outlet to express who I wanted to be, and I was fairly certain I knew what that would look like. I had come to realize that the criticism I had received over the years had gotten to me, because it had been fairly accurate. I was pretending to be a scholar, pretending to be educated. I really didn’t have a clue back then (and to a certain extent, I am still learning). My first step towards this better me was enrolling in college; a colleague told me it was a good means of finding my way.

Since that time, I’ve faced a lot of changes; my views on certain subjects have dramatically shifted as well. I don’t know if it is maturity or education or something else entirely, but I know that I don’t have the same goals and beliefs that I had when I started to build up this blog.

I know, I’m beating around the bush. Let me be blunt about it: I need a change in scenery.

I’ve been involved in Biblical Studies for over a decade now, and as far as interest goes I’ve been reading the bible, the church fathers, and the noncanonical books since I was 16 when I first picked up a copy of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica. Over the last three years I’ve published a handful of academic papers, co-edited a collection of essays, given a few lectures, and co-presented a paper at SBL (though Joel did the presentation, because he’s awesome). All of this I’ve done while working a full time job and going to school part time so I can earn my laurels and gain some credibility.

It hasn’t been an easy road, but it has been one that has tried me. I have been questioning my own motives for a while now; I mean, why am I even studying the bible? I do know how I got involved in it. Initially, when I was a teenager, I wanted to become a priest. While actually reading the texts, I lost my faith, and then became focused on validating that loss. I spent my late teens and early twenties doing really stupid, immature things as a part of that validation. When I got into my mid-late twenties, the bible became all I knew.

When I started to take academia seriously, began working on my academic credentials, it had already started to lose its appeal to me. I had to focus on my book, or on this project, or on that article. After a while it just became habitual; I was studying for studying’s sake. I was going to school and taking classes in Classics and Ancient History and Biblical Studies because it was all I had known, it was something at which I was good (as indicated by the consistently high marks I received).

But just doing something because I could was starting to feel a bit hollow. Part of me felt as though I was just going through the motions. Worse yet, and I hate to say this but, I was outpacing most of my fellow students when it came to basic biblical knowledge. That isn’t me being full of myself, it was an actual thing. There were students who couldn’t even identify trivial knowledge about Jesus and many of these students had grown up around close-knit church communities. I would sit in class and get annoyed, legitimately annoyed, at the sort of things most of my classmates would say or ask. Deep down I knew that for them, these classes were just an elective or something to get them to their last credit before graduating, but that just bothered me more. I mean, didn’t they care? Didn’t they want to learn about it? Why would you spend all that money, go into debt, if you’re just going to not care?

At the time, I thought I was just mad at them. To an extent, I suppose I was. It was more than just simple anger; it was instructive. It became apparent that I didn’t have answers to the very questions I was asking about my peers. Did I want to learn about this? Do I really care? Slowly it became apparent to me that I was burning myself out.

I began to ask myself if I had it in me to deal with that unease every day for a full semester over multiple facets of different types of classes. If this was the path I stayed on, could I consistently teach about something that I felt less inclined towards, to students who consistently cared less and less? I know this isn’t every student—I befriended a lot of great people who were exceptionally smart and fun to be around—but it does represent a good portion. I remember one student showed up for class maybe three times the whole semester; then for his final exam—essay heavy, I might add—he “finished” it after only a half an hour. It was demoralizing.

There were also lots of little things that added up after a while. The intimidation of the loss of tenure-track positions in the field, academic pushback against challenging new concepts, and the amount of pure drivel being published by highly acclaimed, tenured professors—some that passes for academic work these days—also frustrated me. The media’s insistence on ignoring solid, serious scholarship in the field while championing some of the most obvious fakes, frauds, and charlatan’s I’ve come across did not help alleviate my consternation.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the RU Screw (It’s actually in the urban dictionary)—anyone who attends or has attended Rutgers knows what it is I mean. To say that I’ve become disenchanted with academia is an understatement. I still hold that a college degree is important (which is why I’m still going), and I still think that everyone needs a solid education—those are characteristics I am glad to have found useful and don’t intend on leaving behind. I’m just having a harder time believing the idealistic dream I once had that working hard in academia always yields results and respect. It has for me, so far, but only because I’ve been lucky in my friends (I cannot take any credit for myself).

So where does that leave us, this blog, my future? Well, I don’t know. I’m still very passionate about history, but I think I need to step back and reexamine my choices. The college I am now currently enrolled in does not have a Classics program and so what I’m left with is a basic history degree. That suits me, as it broadens my reach a little bit more while stripping away from the specialization that was becoming a little too suffocating.

There is a surprising amount of good that has come from this. Stepping back from Biblical Studies has also allowed me to reacquaint myself with American history, a subject I’ve always loved. It has been a welcoming host; I think part of why I have been so unhappy in Biblical Studies is that I have always had a greater love of American history. After finding personal links to the Revolution through ancestry research, I’ve become even more interested in it.

Incidentally, my schooling has been part time because as a nontraditional student I have to work to pay bills. I think that if I had been able to go to school full time from the start, I not only would have already graduated, but I would be well on my way in grad school. So in a way, while slow-going, it has been a benefit to me to be able to shift fields, if it comes to that.

That also means that with two more years left until I graduate, I have time to figure it all out. In order to find my way, I need to step back from this blog. I need to step aside from Biblical Studies and focus on my work and see where it leads me. Maybe I will find a way to link both fields of American history and Biblical Studies; one friend has suggested combining them into ways to discuss how the bible influenced policies and politics in Colonial America.

Either way, I’m done for now, here, with this blog. I leave you in much of the same way I came–with Calvin and Hobbes and a sincere ‘thank you’ to all my readers over the years. I have tried to do right by my readers and the interwebs, for what it is worth, in an attempt to make up for past transgressions. I hope that you don’t think less of me for this new move, and that I will continue to have your support going forward. This isn’t goodbye forever; however, it is goodbye for now.

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7 Responses

Hi Tom. I’ve only commented here once before, but I have enjoyed reading your last few posts. I just graduated Rutgers in May and am well acquainted with the RU Screw. I’m frankly surprised I was able to survive, as my education has been a long and rocky road, but I did find a good amount of fulfillment in their anthropology department. I wish you the best in your future studies, although I must admit, it would have been nice to have someone to chat about Biblical studies with. The endless back and forth between hardcore “mythicists” and adamant “historicists” in the blogosphere has become quite tiresome, but I still find myself getting drawn back into the topic time and time again. I can definitely agree that it pays to step away sometimes, especially in that line of research.

Thanks for the comment; the hardest part about RU were the professors and the administrators. The classes I never had much trouble with. Also the constant fear of being mugged while walking back to my car on Douglas was also annoying.

I get your meaning on the current historical Jesus debate in the blogosphere. I also found it tiresome. I won’t remove this blog, at least I have no intention to do so. Feel free to still link here if you find anything I’ve written useful to that end.

You are most welcome to contact me if you’re ever in the St. Louis area. I’ll be starting doctoral studies soon, but I do know the difficulties and arbitrariness of these academic programs’ administrators.

And, hey, if you’re still in the market, we Dominicans are on the look-out for potential good biblical scholar brothers to join up :)

Hi, Tom. I fully respect your process. I gained a masters degree in religion from an evangelical school and in the process lost my faith and left the ministry, Christianity and the biblical scholastic disciple all together. It was a difficult but very rewarding process. In these later years (I am now 64) I came back to an interest in biblical studies as a lay hobbyist.

Life is usually long enough for a number of major shifts and enhanced iterations. Truly best wishes.

On a side note concerning the academic disciple of biblical studies, Carrier is absolutely brilliant and I presume to think that his work will do much to reset the dialectic in this field for the next generation. So if you did happen to retain some interest in teaching in the field you may have a leg up. Of course, there’s the counter example in the life of Thompson.